A love letter
to a simpler web.

I've built websites for fifteen years, starting with small clients — a corner shop, a local school, people who had never owned a website before. Every one of them was different, and every one wanted something that felt like theirs.

Back then it was simple. You rented a cheap server, installed the software, and you were live by the afternoon. I thought the tools would only get easier from there.

They didn't. The web went the other way — more services, more databases, more limits, more to pay for every month. The big studios didn't mind; they could afford it. The small clients I started with were quietly priced out of their own websites.

And I was the one who had to explain it to them. Why the site they already had was suddenly too big for The cheapest paid plan is $300 a month — and it still caps you at 25 content types, 20 editors, and 3 languages. More than that? "Contact sales." Listed price, June 2026. See the full comparisonContentful's pricingContentful — hundreds a month just to fit what they already owned. Why It's self-hosted, so the $499-a-month Team licence still leaves you running the server — or paying $89 a month more for them to host it — and it hard-caps at 100 collections. Listed price, June 2026. See the full comparisonDirectus's pricingDirectus meant renting a second server and a licence they weren't allowed to outgrow. Why they couldn't simply open their own page, change a word, and see it live.

I asked myself the same thing every day. With all these big names, all this money — how had no one built the simple, kind thing? The one a normal person could actually use?

So I did. That's where Okno comes from.

Okno means window

It opens onto your own site like a window. It feels like a native app you already know, not an admin panel bolted onto your site — you change anything you've wired in, right on the page, rewriting a heading where it sits or dragging an image straight onto the spot it belongs. Then it closes, and your site is just your site again. Nothing of yours sits on someone else's servers; the only copy is the one in your own repo. You don't have to learn it, and there isn't much you can break.

It's built on what nearly every site already runs on — GitHub. You already have it, and it can do far more than most tools ask of it. A few people have tried this before and built it only for developers. Okno is for everyone who touches the site — and the beautiful part is how far it scales. The same editor runs a one-page shop and a site with dozens of collections and hundreds of pages, and it doesn't get more complicated as the site grows.

And if you build websites for a living, it's for you too. You add it to your config once — a single line — and it works the same in every Vite framework, from Astro to SvelteKit. Nothing runs behind it that you have to maintain, and you never set the same thing up twice.

The web I want

This is the part I care about most. A web where a small budget still buys something better than what used to cost tens of thousands. Where you don't pay every month for a site you barely touch. It's different all the way down — not just what it costs, but what it's like to build with and to use. You pay for the days you actually edit, and a year is never more than €200. A ceiling, never a bill.

That's the web I want to live in — simpler than the one we have, and somehow far more capable. If any of this sounds like something you've felt too, I made Okno for you.

— Gabe